Cuban ballet lends noble style and technique to ‘Quixote’

Shabby cloth backdrops, a patchwork of costume styles, over-amplified taped music, toe shoes on their last legs: These production values usually signal the arrival of an overambitious regional ballet company. But with the National Ballet of Cuba’s “Don Quixote,” Saturday at the Cerritos Center, these things simply acknowledged a poverty of means that the dancers proceeded to utterly obliterate with world-class technique, style and generosity of spirit.

This 1988 production by Marta Garcia, Maria Elena Llorente and company founder-director Alicia Alonso added a political edge to the familiar Petipa/Gorsky classic by setting the action during the French occupation of Spain and making the obnoxious suitor Gamache into a symbol of the hated invaders.

(He even had the peasant-hero, Basilio, arrested in Act 2 and attempted a forced wedding with the heroine, Kitri, in the last act.)

Otherwise, the Cuban version differed from many other stagings by allowing the title character (normally a mime role) to actually dance, and by repeatedly emphasizing his belief in Kitri as the incarnation of his dream-ideal, Dulcinea.

Cuts reduced the three-act work to just over two hours: time enough for the company to confirm its renown and for Viengsay Valdes as Kitri to stop the show with a series of well-nigh unbelievable balances on one pointe.

Hearty and easygoing, Valdes seemed to throw away some of her technical opportunities (especially jumps) and at times risked being overshadowed by the ultra-refined Mercedes of Hayna Gutierrez. However, her warmth, her deft comic interplay with Joel Carreno as Basilio and all the steps that did interest her (including double fouettes) incontestably earned her pride of place.

Beautifully trained, a fine partner and an amiable actor, Carreno danced up to international standards but lacked the heat of his colleagues, never capitalizing on all the extra solo passages allotted him in the Cuban version. As the matador Espada, Victor Gili soloed forcefully and brought extraordinary finesse to his cape-manipulation duties.

Javier Sanchez created no special impact as Sancho Panza, but Octavio Martin (Espada at some performances) partnered effortlessly and yearned nobly as Don Quixote.

As the ballet’s chief oppressors, Felix Rodriguez (Kitri’s father) and Rolando Sarabia Martinez (Gamache) mimed effectively, and Ivette Gonzalez periodically flittered across the stage as Dulcinea.

In the dream scene, Sandaise Arencibia (Dryad Queen) and Idania La Villa (Amor) dominated the 16-member women’s corps with fleet authority.

However, the Gypsy interlude featured uneven solo dancing plus an uneventful and occasionally unmusical flirtation between Basilio and the corps women.

In the last act, a dance for eight couples exuded a sultry Caribbean air: Cuban sensuality blended with the Spanish dance-idiom that every “Don Quixote” evokes and the academic ballet vocabulary that it explores.

Despite all the privations that its political isolation imposes, National Ballet of Cuba is a company that upholds the highest standards of classicism, and every visit teaches us how those standards (along with the dancers who used to belong to the company) are helping reinvigorate ballet in much richer companies far from Havana.